Fuckin' Yuppies

Fuckin’ yuppies. It’s not really their fault and yet it is. They were never there for the bad days, when the block was not all quiet, pretty or safe. When there were two liquor stores within a block of one another, when they sold drinks by the cup, when they sold cigarettes by the quarter, when the corner smelled like piss and beer, when the park was the land of the living dead and your play ground consisted of a 8x3 plot of grass and 30 yards of side walk. Let me tell you, you’ve got to be a real inventive motherfucker. How do you play hoops with no hoop, how do you run the ball with all ball and nowhere to run? A bike that can only go from here to there really stops being a bike.

I happen to live in area that is being “revitalized.” Not that it hasn’t been vital before but the yuppies are here, Starbucks and all. Gone are our quiet days and private pleasures. There were no yuppies when we voted our block dry, there were none when we removed two Aldermen, there were no yuppies when Harold came to plan his run, there were none when he died and all was lost, there were none on those Saturday mornings when the boulevard looked like a parade because PUSH was in session, no there were no yuppies then.

When G.G. showed me what every 13 year old knew and every 7 year old didn’t yet know he needed to know there were no yuppies. How could they know that they had just paved over the very spot where after cold cocking me for missing a pass and making him look bad, he popped the shit out me again for crying in public. They didn’t know that on that very spot I learned the rhythm of the city, that mom checked the window every hour just between soaps, that if you clustered enough kids at this particular building, the line of sight from the window didn’t allow you to distinguish one child from another, god bless the dogwood tree. The didn’t know that this is where there was a shortcut to the other side of the block, under the gangway, and up you pop right in front of the bus barn; a handy piece of information when you were being chased by “the big kids.” But the yuppies don’t know this. I guess they didn’t know about GDK, BPSN and upside down pitchforks, the sigil that kept us safe from 63 to 39 back in the day. They didn’t know that on that day, on that spot, he had been made and the concrete next to that spot just happened to be fresh, and there he made his mark and taught me a little more about the world I would grow up in. They didn’t know that from here to there and back was just about 45 minutes, but that you had to come around from the back so that your mother could see you come from the upside of the block and believe (maybe not) that you had just gone around the block. They didn’t know that in that run you could get $10, just for running an “errand.” A dollar out of fifteen cents.

I guess what offends me is that they move in, they don’t speak, they don’t ask, the don’t know and they don’t care. They don’t know that when I walked by “my spot” and saw it wasn’t there, paved over fresh and clean, I nearly lost my mind. They don’t know that the rules that kept me safe, the ghosts that watched over me all these years, the memories of who I have become have their root in that very spot . . . they don’t know how I cried.

Fuckin’ yuppies.

GG R.I.P.

Cyrus